(Joshua Paladino, Headline USA) The State Department has funded the Global Disinformation Index, a far-left non-profit group that identifies conservative sources of “disinformation” and tells Big Tech to crush them, the Daily Caller reported.
Last week, Twitter CEO Elon Musk informed the public about a new and unknown State Department organization, the Global Engagement Center, which he called the “worst offended in US government censorship & media manipulation.”
On its website, GDI described its operations as a “non-political” effort to “disrupt the business model of disinformation” and to “defund and downrank these worst offenders.”
The worst offenders all happen to have conservative, nationalist, and libertarian leanings.
Further investigation has revealed the GEC’s ties to the GDI and the clear partisan agenda in its main report: the Dynamic Exclusion List.
The report looked at 69 English- and Spanish-language news websites and ranked them according to their disinformation “risk level.” The results speak for themselves.
NPR, ProPublica, the AP, USA Today, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, and even Buzz Feed News and the Huff Post earned a “minimum” risk rating.
The New York Post, Real Clear Politics, the Daily Wire, the Blaze, the Federalist, Newsmax, One America News Network, and the American Conservative received a “high” risk of disinformation rating.
In 2021, the State Department co-hosted the U.S.-Paris Tech Challenge to find companies who could “advance the development of promising and innovative technologies against disinformation and propaganda.”
Three companies, the Global Disinformation Index, the Institute of Strategic Dialogue and CASM Technology, and the InVID-WeVerify open source verification plugin, won $250,000 grants from the competition.
Congress passed and former President Barack Obama signed the Countering Foreign Propaganda and Disinformation Act in 2016, and it authorized the creation of the State Department’s Global Engagement Center.
The usual Republicans—former Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio and former Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois—co-sponsored the bipartisan legislation along with Democrat Rep. Ted Lieu of California and Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut.